Higher Education

Jun
09

Centering Risk Communication on Active Listening

“Pockets of U.S. Still Resisting Urgent Mantra to Stay at Home” read a front page headline in The Washington Post on April 3.  Indeed, a major challenge of managing the horrific health and economic consequences of the Coronavirus epidemic has been to convince people throughout the world to take seriously the need to social distance.  [...]
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Jun
09

Listening in the Time of the COVID-19 Pandemic: Ignoring What We Listen to May Not Be Our Fault

Abstract Some scholars in the field of Communication have tended to largely focus on the production of utterances and the effective creation of informative and persuasive speeches, interpersonal, intercultural, business, and other types of communication, sometimes controlled by the sender of a message. Subsequently, these areas are often taught to the exclusion of listening as [...]
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Jun
09

The Spirituality of Listening

What is the relationship of spirituality to listening? How does this relationship fit into our understanding of communication? Why is it important? For over twenty-two years, the premise of my work has been that listening is a sacred art and a spiritual practice. Even though historically these terms have most frequently been ascribed to religion, [...]
By Admin | Higher Education
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Jun
09

Ethical Listening…Do You Hear What I Hear?

In my current (nearly two decades now!) role as a Communication professor, I emphasize to my students—especially those enrolled in my Public Relations courses—the critical importance of listening to those who have an interest in your organization’s activities and ensuring that their concerns are addressed appropriately. British philosopher George Edward Moore said it so clearly [...]
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Sep
16

I hear you : Comments on the Sound Practice of Listening

Typically, hearing is contrasted to listening, and such comparisons almost always favor listening. This dichotomy substitutes for the more complex understanding that there is no single type of listening, but rather, to employ a technique derived from general semantics, we can say that there are multiple varieties of listenings.

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Aug
17

Listening and Not Listening to Voices of Women Who Worked as Maids in the Jim Crow South

Abstract. This article discusses the art and science of listening. The focus is on listening, with an emphasis on the personal narrative which can take us into others’ lives, into their feeling memories, as they describe what they saw, heard, tasted, and smelled in another place, another time. The voices are those of storytellers who [...]
By Admin | Higher Education
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Dec
27

Can We Communicate without Listening?

Dr Margarita K. Kefalaki President, Communication Institute of Greece View
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How Listening Filters Cause Misunderstanding

For decades I’ve been writing and thinking about the system of communication to develop ways for us to better understand each other.

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Listening as Service: The Gift of Receptivity

There some ancient wisdom to the effect that the path to the spiritual, as well as material, success in life comes through love, meditation, and service—for some

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Sep
01

An Ode To Listening

It is the spaces between the keys on the piano, the intervals between drops of rain in a storm, the branches of a tree swaying in a breeze, the vertices of a snowflake cascading its way down through the crispy icy air, the sun’s rays hitting the pedestrian as he wends his way home, the time passing between unhurried breaths and the time hastily spent worrying about how a breath may be delivered in a song or a speech or even in a kiss, the love between two people or maybe an entire nation, the color of a favorite food or the sky or the earth, the longing of a distant cry or the sniffling cry nearby, the warmth of a parent toward child, the length and breadth and depth of a lifetime or the span in nanoseconds of a moment, the need to be heard alongside the one who’s being summoned to hear, the invocation of praise, the excommunication of a heretic, the willingness to proceed with a desired action, the denial of a given action, the imprints as they are squished in ecstatic merriment made in puddles left by a persevering rain, the cautious croaking of a bullfrog or the majestic squawking of a goose or a swan or a crane or a heron in flight–such an exhausting array of listening–too much for one listener to internalize at one time, never enough to realize the scope of the living.

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